By Christopher Stewart
A slate-gray sea melded with a cinereous sky,
and coal-colored clouds were hurled
toward the shore by a ravening west wind.
I walked for hours and saw no one, only gulls
pecking into the flesh of a seal’s cadaver
at the water’s edge. Carrion driftwood
bleached to bone caught rancid seaweed
into its stemmed claws, and the dune rises
in the shade of ocher blood held
the horizon so that one could not see
out of this place. The mind tells stories
only it can believe, impalpable fragments
decades in the making until the jagged landscape
of the soul is made visible in the salted air,
the penultimate truth, the awful beauty.
Christopher Stewart is the author of What Came After (The Calliope Group) and co-author (with Quraysh Ali Lansana) of The Walmart Republic (Mongrel Empire Press). His poems have appeared in RHINO, Bellevue Literary Review, Plainsongs, Oberon, Connecticut River Review, Eastern Iowa Review, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2025 RHINO Poetry Founder’s Prize. You can learn more about him on his website.
